Equinix Releases Data Hub For Enterprises Wanting Power On The Edge

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Equinix claims it can solve data demands brought on by real-time analytics, IoT, and data protection by moving storage and power closer to source and users

Data centre colocation provider Equinix is offering a new service that it claims will help enterprise customers move their large chunks of legacy data to the edge of their cloud, rather than having it stuck in data warehouses.

Called Data Hub, the service is part of Equinix’s Interconnection Orientated Architecture (IOA), and is a bundled product that is made up of pre-configured colocation and power alongside cloud storage services.

Customers can then, in theory, create large data repositories and dispense, consume, and process that data at the edge, close to both source and users.

IoT and Big Data

One driver for the Hub service is the industry shift towards IoT and Big Data, said Equinix. As data volumes continue to increase at the edge, it is seen as impractical to some to rely on existing enterprise networks to move that data to a central processing facility with the required speed and in a cost-effective manner, goes Equinix’s reasoning.

The company sees it critical for enterprises to re-think their existing IT infrastructure, and develop an IOA, at the edge. Data Hub, when combined with Equinix’s earlier released Performance Hub, and Cloud Exchange, provides Equinix’s recommended suite of components required to implement an IOA strategy.

Data Hub is cloud-agnostic and works with Equinix’s Cloud Exchange. This allows for an enterprise “data lake” to be simultaneously accessible from multiple public and private cloud services.

“Data Hub is the newest solution from Equinix and we are confident that it will provide our enterprise customers with the data management solutions they need today, while providing for growth tomorrow,” said Equinix platform strategy vice president Lance Weaver.

“Data, and its exponential growth, continues to be an ongoing concern for enterprise IT. And there is no expectation it will slow down in the near future. To keep up with this relentless data rise, it is critical for the enterprise to rethink its IT architecture and focus on an interconnection-first strategy.”

Equinix sees its solution working perfectly with customers in verticals like healthcare and the public sector, where data is usually tied to regulatory and compliance constraints and public cloud isn’t the favoured option.

With Hub, Equinix customers can run on any cloud they wish, whilst not having to stretch back to the data repositories that would be housed with Microsoft, Google, and AWS, for example.

Data Hub provides the data centre locations needed to store performance and capacity tiers of data and metadata close to their sources (enterprise offices, Internet, public clouds), said Equinix, in addition to providing private high-bandwidth links to public clouds.